Two Wheels Good: The History and Mystery of the Bicycle by Jody Rosen

Author:Jody Rosen [Rosen, Jody]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780804141499
Publisher: Crown
Published: 2022-05-24T00:00:00+00:00

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The bicycle is a beast of burden. For as long as bikes have existed, people have been stacking things on top of them and carting stuff around. In Karl von Drais’s original 1817 design, the Laufmaschine had both a rear-mounted “luggage board” and fittings for panniers akin to those slung over the backs of packhorses. The various Laufmaschine-derived two-wheelers that appeared in the years immediately following Drais’s invention likewise all featured cargo racks. The same is true of nearly every bicycle manufactured in the two centuries since. Bikes have front racks and rear racks and beam racks; cargo boxes and baskets; panniers and saddlebags; horizontally and vertically oriented carriers; trailers and sidecars that hitch to frames; holdalls that attach to the handlebars or mount in the back; seats and carts and platforms for transporting children. Of course, there are many varieties of bikes expressly designed as freight vehicles—“cycle trucks,” porteurs, Long John bicycles, and other bikes whose frames, drivetrains, and wheelbases are engineered to accommodate payloads. The more remarkable fact, from an engineering standpoint, is that even the spindliest conventional bicycle will support a load of many times its own weight, assuming the stuff is properly balanced and secured. Bikes are built to schlep.

History has turned on this principle. On February 2, 1967, Senator William Fulbright of Arkansas convened a special hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on the state of the American intervention in Vietnam. The star witness was Harrison Salisbury, the assistant managing editor of The New York Times, who had recently returned from a trip to Hanoi. It was no secret that American forces were struggling in Vietnam, but Salisbury’s testimony startled the committee. The United States was losing the war, he said, and it was being beaten by bicycles.

Salisbury told the senators that the North Vietnamese Army’s supply chain—the munitions and matériel that flowed from north to south along the Ho Chi Minh Trail—was largely conducted using bicycles. The bikes were single-speed roadsters, manufactured in China. But the Vietcong reconfigured them. They widened the handlebars, welded broad platforms to the frames, and reinforced the suspensions, transforming the bicycles into rolling cargo pallets capable of bearing loads of several hundred pounds. They also wreathed the bikes in leaves, for camouflage. Traveling in teams of dozens, the bicycles could transport the same volume of supplies as trucks, and they were stealthier, nimbler, more maneuverable. American forces strafed the Ho Chi Minh Trail with Agent Orange to strip away the jungle cover; they bombed roads and bridges. But the bikes were hard to spot, and unlike larger vehicles, they could negotiate the narrow bamboo footbridges that the Vietcong had thrown up to replace those the Americans had destroyed. “I literally believe that without bikes [the North Vietnamese Army] would have to get out of the war,” Salisbury told the Foreign Relations Committee. Senator Fulbright was incredulous: “Why don’t we concentrate on bicycles?”

In fact, bicycles had been utilized as military supply vehicles since the nineteenth century. More widespread still was the commercial and industrial use of cargo bikes.

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